Every day, I leverage technology to eliminate the little annoyances that come with computer use. By tweaking settings, exploring new software, and automating...
When you use software, you’ll inevitably hit some friction: small bugs, missing features, or rough edges. But you don’t have to just complain about it while it’s staring you in the face. Find the project’s issue tracker and submit a ticket. Chances are it’ll be addressed in a future release. And if it’s open source, you can go one step further and implement the change yourself. Of course, there…
I just stumbled upon the article titled Trust me: You don’t want to make little personal apps… especially not like that! by Ross Wintle and I'd like to share a different perspective: for technical minds and learners, for engineering souls. I've been dabbling in code for around 20 years now and doing it professionally for over a decade, whatever I do, I always try to understand the wider…
At work I am handling a fairly massive TypeScript monorepo, and I have been using Cursor as my main IDE for a few months. The live type inference in the editor has been painfully slow since I started on this project, but I thought there was not much I could do about it. Eventually, as the project grew, Cursor started showing a "TypeScript server is approaching the memory limit" notice, suggesting…
While continuing the setup of my Linux machine, I've encountered an intriguing issue with the window management script I'm creating. Specifically, after hiding a Vesktop or Discord window, the very next click would unexpectedly bring a Cursor window to the front. Regarding Discord, it typically minimizes to the tray but also forces its window to appear on the taskbar unless KWin's window…
Recently, I've been setting up Linux on my main machine, defaulting to KDE as it feels like it requires the fewest changes to suit my workflow. Having relied on AHK for "quake mode" persistent apps for years, I knew I'd need similar functionality on Linux. Kwin scripts seemed like an obvious choice, and I expected the code to be simpler than AHK thanks to the saner syntax of JavaScript.…
Whether it's a feature suggestion or a pull request optimizing some code path you are very likely to see response similar to "nah, thanks, it's fine as is". This is often followed by "if you don't like it you are free to create a fork". And don't get me wrong, community contributions are liabilities the main maintainers team will have to keep supporting in the future. However, rejecting input…
Linux distributions are often praised for their easy to use package managers and repositories. And I get that, the promise they make is amazing. But the reality is often disappointing. Often the piece of software you want to use, and even a quite popular one, isn't available in the officially maintained repositories and you end up following official tutorials (that may not work) or even running…
The Past: When Interfaces Worked for Us Interfaces were compact, densely packed with information, yet remained intuitive and easy to use. Icons might have been modest—16x16px in 256 colors—but their symbolism was clear, leaving little room for misinterpretation. Most complex tools accommodated diverse workflows with configurable toolbars. Drag-and-drop customization wasn't always an option, but…
Rally cars are fun, fast, and able to handle poor-quality roads—or even "not-actually-a-road"s—exceptionally well. However, that capability comes at a cost. Rally cars are stripped of all the conveniences found in your good old city car. There's no AC, no multimedia, no automatic wipers, no adaptive headlights. The seats aren't built for comfort; they’re specifically designed to keep you in place…
If you're worried about the safety of less tech-literate friends, family, or colleagues who might click before thinking, here's a practical way to protect them. Moving them to Linux isn’t always viable, so let's use Windows' powerful permissions system instead. Steps to Secure the Downloads Directory: Access Security Settings: Right-click the Downloads directory, select Properties , go to the…